Back to the Future Part III

I’m quite sure you’ve at least heard of the Back to the Future films. Unfortunately not all of them (part one is missing) were made into PC computer games.

At the end of the second part of the movie Doc is stuck in the wild west and it’s up to Marty to go and help him. Again, like with Back to the Future Part II the game doesn’t follow the movie, but only takes some parts of the plot.

I’m guessing that’s why the first part of the game doesn’t seem familiar.

Doc is ridding to save the school teacher (who’d ultimately become the love of his life) from a certain death. OK, in the movie he saved her too, but he didn’t have collect her panties on the way, jump over chests, duck under tomahawks, ride through a valley where a war between the army and the Indians was taking place and so on.

After you successfully save her, it’s Marty’s turn for some action. You get to the shooting gallery. Guess what you have to do there? That’s right, you either need to pick up all the little needles from the cactus without getting bitten by a singing germ, or at least shoot. The good thing about the shooting gallery is that you can enter it at the opening screen and practice.

The third part is again something you can practice first. It’s the pie throwing. Remember how Marty had to fight off the entire gang? Well, you’ll get to do that here. Standing in front of a Saloon you’ll have pies at your disposal and you’ll have to throw them at any bad guy showing his face and trying to shoot you. You’re wearing armor of course, so you can take a few shots without dying right away.

And finally you need to take the control of the train. It’s the one that will enable you to travel back to the future and it’s also the one that Doc will convert into a new state of the art time machine, the one he’ll use in the animated series that followed the movie (don’t worry, even if you fail that won’t affect the animated series).

So it’s an action game that will help you pass the time you could do something more creative (like counting the leaves on the tree above your favorite bench in the park). The graphics are OK, but not spectacular, unfortunately the sounds are bad. They are too high pitched for my taste and hurt the ears. The gameplay is easy enough, yet does present a challenge. All in all it’s a solid time waster that deserves an average mark.

Although the game is playable at the default DOSBox speed (3000 cycles), I suggest you slow it down a bit, as it gets considerably easier (especially at the shooting gallery).

All the files needed to play this game must be in C:\Future folder. If you’re using DOSBox you might need to change the specification to the mount command.

Reviewed by: Sebatianos

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